EFFECT OF VIBRATION ON THE VISUAL TELESCOPIC IMAGING OF SINUSOIDAL GRATINGS

On many occasions observers using telescope and sighting instruments s ee an image subject to an oscillatory displacement. It is of interest to the designers and users of these optical instruments to know in a q uantitative way how such image oscillation will affect overall perform ance. This paper describes a set of laboratory experiments undertaken in carefully controlled conditions to study this problem in terms of i ts effect on the contrast sensitivity function of observers as they lo oked through a 10 x telescope at sinusoidal grating targets. The exper iments show that observers perform this task surprisingly well, obtain ing results that are hard to explain in terms of simple modelling.